Well, as a Black American woman from a low-income background, I constantly say that "development" not only takes place in Africa, Asia, and any other place typically associated with the Global South. There are several places even in the world's "richest" country that reflect not only deprivation but what happens when environmental justice is not served. In light of this and in honor of Earth Day on Monday April 22, in this post I will focus on the nexus of ICT4D and environmental justice in the US.

Last week I think many of us who work in international development were quite shocked and disappointed to learn of the scandal with Oxfam employees who paid (?) prostitutes for sex, in housing provided by Oxfam no less. Before we had time to say that this was an isolated incident, it emerged that possibly the same thing had happened in Chad with a man implicated in the Haiti scandal, Roland van Hauwermeiren. These incidents are in no way solely a problem of Oxfam, or of international development more broadly, but rather form a part of the overarching and global challenges around men who commit violence against women and girls with relatively little impunity. I believe this Oxfam story may be the start of the #MeToo movement shining its light on injustices in international development. In this blog post, I'll explain why mobile should urgently be considered as a safeguard to help prevent further abuses of this nature.

Returning to a favorite (re: only) theme of mine, education, I was struck recently by the uptick in the number of foreign universities setting up branch campuses in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and presumably throughout the continent, ideally bolstering domestic capacity for graduates who can push forward development agendas requiring greater and greater access to skilled labor. The schools and university sectors are just strands of a larger neoliberal loosening of public control over what was once the exclusive purview of the public sector, but no need to get too big picture for the time being.

Returning to the subject of education and gender, this post is a bit more about using the data available to you to make informed decisions when running ICT4D projects. For some, these will be painfully apparent; for others, perhaps a little less so, so I am essentially writing this post for the latter group. Experts and data-savvy types, avert your eyes.It is probably best to frame this around a particular question or conjecture, so I am going to assume that one of the potential pathways for greater employability for women in some countries and in particular greater employability in "innovative" fields is research.

Returning to a favorite subject of mine, discussed here and here in past posts, is the ongoing Bridge Academy debacle throughout the continent, but particularly in Kenya, which has now turned legal.

“Lawyers for the for-profit chain secured a temporary court order preventing Wilson Sossion, General Secretary of the Kenyan National Union of Teachers (KNUT), and the union or its “agents,” from publicly criticizing Bridge “pending” a court hearing. Bridge accuses Sossion of putting a “malicious post on twitter about the institution.” Sosson accused Bridge of recruiting the “richest of the poor at great cost of those families.”

Given our experience in ICT4D, we understand well that no solution which makes use of technology will be sustainable if the intended beneficiaries cannot afford the technology. This is why we are excited to share our takeaways from the latest A4AI annual Affordability Report, what we consider to be a definitive source on issues related to ICT access.

Following the still hard to fathom inauguration of President Trump on the 20th January 2017, Panoply Digital was inspired to see the international solidarity of people in the women’s marches that unfolded as a resulting protest. We hope we as a worldwide community can translate these marches into political, social, and legal apparatuses that ensure we don’t have the need to do this again in subsequent generations - despite history indicating we will. At the very least, we are thrilled at the prospect of these marchers leading the fight against injustice; these are the people we want out front. Panoply Digital stands in support, and wishes to make a brief statement about what these events mean to us.

Developing capacity and expertise isn’t always about doing; reading and research need to be a part of the equation. I outlined a few of the reports we were reading in a previous post. Recently I was reviewing the Measuring the Information Society Report 2016 from ITU (ITU is the United Nations specialized agency for ICTs).

As we approach the end of the year, we at Panoply Digital are working our projects and spending some time in research, reading, and reflection. In the interests of sharing, I wanted to share the reading and research part as it affects many of us working in international education and ICT4D.

Reading a recent UNICEF post from Suman Khadka titled Star Wars: Force For Change supports digital monitoring systems in Cambodia, I found myself reflecting a bit on visibility in terms of tracking, monitoring, and surveillance. The project that Khadka describes involves “the technology for a digital tracking system which converts the paper-based method to an Inspection App. The app can complete the equivalent of a 20-page form — a process that previously took multiple days — in just one day.”

The allure of educational technology in serving those who have remain underserved for so long is tough to resist. It drives us in the educational community towards totalizing terms: the seamless, ubiquitous, and evidence-based results of technological interventions. The end-to-end solution, the driving of test scores, the tables and rankings, the address of the digital divide, the stock photos of children gleaming over tablets in otherwise modest classrooms. I understand why we adopt the neoliberal, totalizing rhetoric put forth by the private community in providing these services. It makes sense. It is a vision, however hollow, of a better future. And it continues to miss the mark. We see evidence of this throughout the developing world (and developed as well) most recently manifest in Liberia as it has been announced that “the entire pre-primary and primary education system would be outsourced to Bridge International Academies to manage.”

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.